Legend of Legaia was one of my favourite when I first started playing my Playstation. It has great battle system, interesting story progression and great music (from what I can remember). I haven't played the second one, I did have a copy but kind of lent/traded it for Tales of Eternia on PSP.

---->THE Legend of Dragoon<-------- Is a great game also. Some people hate on it for it's battle system, but I think it is very strong. I have no problems with the graphics either, they still look very good to me, even now.

1. Games have always been trend driven. Assuming that means what I think it means.

2. Gaming trends are unpredictable as hell and trying to do so is largely pointless. Look at last year. Minecraft and Angry Birds were pretty damn successful. So were several FPSes and the Pokemon remakes. There probably IS an underlying trend there but good luck finding it.

3. Games are like 60 dollars these days anything less than stellar from any genre gets ignored because nobody can afford it.

4. From what I can gather the average JRPG lately has been pretty mediocre. JRPGs generally need to go out of their way to be fun more than your average FPS does because if an FPS is sort of mediocre, it's still an FPS. If a JRPG is mediocre, it's just a bunch of menus.

1&2)All you seem to have done is nitpick on terms I have used.

What I meant by "trend" would probably be better described by "hit". Similar to movies, only the hyped movies, well known and "cool" (again generalising) do consistantly well in box office. There are exceptions, like you mentioned, and I will liken those to sleeper hits in the indie movie scene.

3) What I meant by "anything less than stellar is not given that kind of attention by the fans". Is that anything less than stellar in the JRPG genre won't get the kind of word of mouth driven sales given to all the popular games selling today.

4) Is it really the case that comparing average JRPG to average shooter will have the shooter come out the better game? That seems exactly like the belief that many reviewers have at the moment. (I am seriously asking, I do not play a whole lot of shooters, but from my experience the average shooters I have played have been less than that.)

I think PrimeMover has some good points and while these kinds of things certainly are adding to the problem, they are probably not the biggest factor. Game quality over the last few years is probably playing a major part.

I do think however that since gaming has becoming trend driven/cool, the things that sell and things that don't are much more defined. American gamers (generalising here) are currently following the trend of "cool" games, being shooters and a the like, and people who would have normally been interested in JRPG's are pressured into liking the "cool" games (either by society or people they associate with). It would seem that good games in the JRPG genre are largely overlooked by the general populace/trends (Nier and Valkyria Chronicles) and are only spread through more gamers by VERY strong word of mouth, anything less than stellar is not given that kind of attention by the fans.

There also seems to be a fad for reviewers rating an average JRPG a lot lower than an average shooter, and as far as I can tell, sites like Metacritic and reviews are having a very large impact on game sales.